Finish
My dulcimers are finished with tung oil and polished with furniture wax. The soundboard has only one thin coat of tung oil and is not waxed. A black soundboard is stained but not polished, varnished or waxed. If at some time in the future it becomes necessary to refinish or simply retouch your dulcimer, you can rub it lightly with steel wool #0000 and apply tung oil according to the directions on the can. Nothing to it! After you’re done retouching, you can also apply a coat of furniture wax, wait for it to haze over, and polish with a soft cloth.
Dust
I leave my dulcimer always set up. An instrument wrapped and tucked away is soon forgotten. The only thing is, dust will accumulate on the soundboard if the dulcimer is always set up. A makeshift duster can be made by inserting a stiff piece of cardboard into a sock. This way you can work the sock under the strings.
Strings
Your dulcimer will go on for many years before it may need restringing. I’ve heard of fifty-year-old dulcimers hardly needing any new strings. When strings become dull or corroded because of humidity, a little rubbing with a small wad of #0000 steel wool will go a long way toward restoring their original sheen.
Strings may break because of oversight. Sometimes, when tuning my instrument, I may be cranking one string and plucking another. I haven’t managed to break a string that way yet, but give me a chance.
Plain strings are cut from different gauges of steel piano wire, or music wire.
Music wire is sold by several enterprises such as music stores, piano repair stores, and a bunch of places doing business on the internet. Search for piano wire, or music wire.
Tuning
As with anything worth doing, it may take you a while to become proficient in quickly and accurately tuning your instrument.
Because of the changes of temperature and movement it will undergo during shipping, your new dulcimer will need a good tuning right out of the box. While the instrument is new, it will take several tunings until it settles and its voice develops.
After your dulcimer settles, it will hold tuning for a week or so, and will hold relative tuning for a bit longer. Relative tuning is when the instrument is in tune with itself but not necessarily in concert pitch.
Those that have the rare ability to tune instruments by ear are already making a living tuning pianos for Carnegie Hall. The rest of us have to settle for a chromatic electronic tuner that goes for about $20 from mail order houses.
As you become more familiar with tuning, you should be able to fully tune your dulcimer in less than one half hour. When you reach that point of expertise, then it may be time for you to attempt voicing the dulcimer. (See below)
Bridge Setting
The hammered dulcimer and its relatives, the yang-chin, the cimbalom, the santur, etc. comprise the only family of instruments designed to produce two notes from a single string, (except the bass strings) by passing each string over a bridge that divides it into two unequal parts. On the American dulcimer, that bridge is positioned at a theoretical distance exactly two-fifths of the total vibrating length of the string. The vibrating length of the string is the distance between the two stop caps. The stop caps are the plastic or brass bars that go under the strings right next to the pinblocks. This positioning produces a fifth interval all across the bridge, the low notes being on the right hand side and the high notes being on the left. When the right hand side of a string is tuned to C the left hand side should produce a G.
The bridges are held on top of the soundboard by string pressure alone. It’s possible that through jarring during transportation or because of settling, the bridge might have shifted a fraction of an inch from its correct position. That would create a problem in tuning.
To make sure that the bridge is in the right position, begin by tuning the top note on the right side of the bridge. If the note on the left side is correct, then the top of the bridge, at least, is in the right position. Now tune the bottom note on the right side. If the note on the other side is correct, then the whole bridge is in the right position and all the notes along the bridge should be correct.
If you tune the right side note to pitch and the left side note is flat, the bridge should be moved toward the flat note. If the left side note is sharp, then the bridge should move to the right. To move the bridge, place the eraser end of a new pencil against the bottom of the bridge, and gently tap the other end of the pencil with a hammer. Unless the bridge has been forcefully moved way out of position, a minute shift in its placement, a millimeter or less, is all that may be needed to bring both sides in tune. Remember: the bridge should always be moved away from the sharp side. Naturally, every time you move the bridge, the strings should be retuned.
The placement of the bass bridge is not critical as long as it hasn’t been moved way out of position.
Sometimes, because of jarring or other violent causes, a bridge may move up or down along its axis besides laterally. When that happens, strings that run under it may touch its sides and produce a buzzing. The best cure for that is by eyeballing it back to the correct position vertically, followed by tuning to make sure that it’s also correct laterally.
All this may sound a bit too complicated in the beginning. Don’t worry: soon you will master the art of tuning and playing the hammered dulcimer, like thousands of others have done before you.
Voicing
It may take up to a year for the voice of an instrument to mature. With time, the structure settles and the wood becomes musically more responsive. But besides the passage of time, there is another tool in your hands with which you may affect the way your dulcimer sounds -- the two steel rods underneath the soundboard.
These rods can be moved closer or farther away from the bridges to change the timbre of the strings. When the rod is too far away from the bridge, the timbre becomes thumpy. When the rod is exactly under the bridge, the timbre may be too tight, with hardly any resonance. There are several positions in-between, however, when the strings sound bright and responsive.
Voicing is an art and, consequently, extremely subjective. I have voiced your new instrument to sound bright and responsive -- to my ears. As the instrument settles and its voice develops, you may want to take a crack at voicing it again.
To voice your instrument, notice first that the bass bridge lies almost parallel and to one side to the rod underneath, while the treble bridge forms a shallow X with its respective rod. Begin by releasing tension in all the strings by at least one half turn. When that's done, you may move the top or bottom or both sides of each rod by tapping with a screwdriver. Don't displace the rod for more than one eighth of an inch. Now tune up the dulcimer again and listen to its timbre, especially of the top and bottom strings. If you are not satisfied with what you hear, you may repeat the process. If the rods refuse to move, you may have to further release string tension.
By releasing the tension of the strings you may accidentally move the treble bridge -- the one whose position is more critical to correct tuning. Also, the stop cap rails at the sides may slide inward. You will have to place every piece in position before you tighten up the strings again.
You realize by now that voicing takes up a lot of time and patience, but the payoff may be well worth the effort.
Avoid judging the voice of an out-of-tune instrument! Strings even slightly out of pitch create dissonances and other physical effects too complicated to explain here. Suffice to say that a poorly tuned instrument sounds like a poorly built instrument -- and that's unfair both to the instrument and to its builder.
And, finally, remember the old joke about the tourist who asks a New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall, and the New Yorker answers, practice! With practice, you, too, can get to...well, no dulcimer player has ever played Carnegie Hall but you know what I mean.
Enjoy your instrument, and, please, send me a copy of your first CD!
